Current weather

Thompson: NBAF opponents must do their homework

Posted: Sunday, January 27, 2008

Jim

Thompson

more Thompson columns

The moment that Ed Hammond and FAQ lost me came relatively late in the public meeting they hosted Tuesday at the University of Georgia's Center for Continuing Education, a meeting held for the express purpose of arguing against locating the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility in Athens-Clarke County and ginning up public opposition to the facility.

That moment came when someone in the audience asked a couple of basic questions about NBAF. The first was how much water the facility, for which Athens-Clarke County remains on the short list of potential sites, would use. The second question was how the process for determining where the facility would be located will play itself out.

Hammond, a bioweapons lab opponent who directs The Sunshine Project, a Texas-based watchdog group, couldn't answer the water question, and Kathy Prescott of FAQ mumbled a singularly unhelpful response to the question about NBAF siting protocols.

The acronym FAQ stands For Athens Quality-of-life. FAQ is a new local nonprofit organization dedicated, according to its Web site -www.athensfaq.org - to serving "as a citizen's awareness vehicle." Or so they say.

FAQ sponsored Hammond's Tuesday appearance and, in the process, managed to call into question its goal of promoting "citizen awareness," as the inability of a group leader and the group's invited guest to make citizens aware of even the most basic information about NBAF amply proved.

Here, for the record, are the answers to both questions:

The facility will use somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 gallons of water per day.

A final decision on the site for NBAF will be made in the fall of this year, following the completion this spring of environmental impact reviews for the short-listed sites, and a springtime opportunity for the public in those locations to offer comment.

Also for the record, it took just a few minutes of surfing the Web to get that information.

Oh, sure, sitting in front of a computer monitor and typing on a keyboard isn't half as much fun as printing up scary-looking fliers festooned with biohazard symbols and printed with the question "DO WE REALLY WANT THE WORLD'S LARGEST, DEADLIEST BIO-TERROR LAB IN ATHENS?," as FAQ did to promote the Tuesday meeting.

But, in the end, the Web surfing can be a whole lot more productive.

Want to know what NBAF is all about?

Well, fire up the PC and check out a couple of Web sites:

At http://cryptome.org/dhs011906-2.txt, you'll read "NBAF would provide new research, development, testing and evaluation infrastructure that will allow for research to enhance agricultural and public health. This capability is needed to fill a critical gap in the nation's agro and biodefense plan."

At Page 43 of http://www.ucop.edu/research/homelandsecurity/documents/STFY2006CJ2022005Final1.pdf., you'll read: "The National Bio and Agrodefense Facility (NBAF) will extend the capabilities of DHS S&T (the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate) for threat characterization, forensics, and detection to defend both animal and public health. This additional capability will meet the requirements (of) ... providing a 'safe, secure, and state-of-the-art agriculture biocontainment laboratories that research and develop diagnostic capabilities for foreign animal and zoonotic (transmissible from animals to humans) diseases.'"

Does that sound like "THE WORLD'S LARGEST, DEADLIEST BIO-TERROR LAB"?

Hardly.

And that, unfortunately, speaks volumes about the character of local opposition to NBAF. As the FAQ flier illustrated, NBAF opponents aren't above using scare tactics to gin up fear about NBAF, even as they suggest the federal government is using scare tactics to get the facility built. Athens-Clarke Mayor Heidi Davison had it pegged exactly right when she said, in a Friday story in this newspaper, "The very thing they despise is the very tactic they're using. They're not open to anything but their own cynicism."

In a letter to the editor in today's paper, Prescott and Grady Thrasher, another member of FAQ, indicate their willingness to engage in a constructive, fact-based dialogue on NBAF. That's a welcome development. But clearly, they've got some work to do before they have a sufficient command of the issues.

I'm not saying their concerns about the possibility that NBAF will, in effect, be a bioweapons facility, aren't valid. I don't know of many people who are willing to take the government's word at face value.

What I am saying, though, is that if NBAF opponents can't be bothered to come to even a nodding acquaintance with the official line on what NBAF will be, what it will do, and its potential impacts on the community, how do they expect to be taken seriously when they want to present arguments against the facility?

 Jim Thompson is editorial page editor of the Athens Banner-Herald. He can be contacted at (706) 208-2222 or by e-mail at jim.thompson@onlineathens.com.